After a fairy carnival, a lawsuit targeting a genie

People will believe in the darnedest things. Example, just days after a report came along of that incredibly silly fairy festival, now I'm hearing of a Saudi family who are suing a genie for allegedly harassing them.

Maybe I need to repeat that. A family of adults are dragging a mythical, invisible spirit into court. They're claiming it stole their cellphones, left threatening voicemails, and threw them rocks when they left their house at night.

Don't bother reading it a third time. It won't make any more sense.

"We have to verify the truthfulness of this case despite the difficulty of doing so," Sheikh Amr Al Salmi, the head of the court, told Al-Watan. "What makes this case and complaint more interesting is that it wasn't filed by just one person. Every member of the family is part of this case."

The family, which has lived in the same house near the holy city of Medina for 15 years, said it became aware of the spirit in the past two years.

"We began hearing strange noises," the head of the family, who requested anonymity, told Al-Watan. "In the beginning, we didn't take it seriously, but after that, stranger things started happening and the children got really scared when the genie began throwing stones."

A local charity has moved the family to a temporary residence while a court investigates, the newspaper said.

In Islamic cultures, a belief in genies, or jinns, is common.

But as we know that commonness in no way equates to evidence or a logical argument, there's nothing that should hold us from calling this family a bunch of severely paranoid kooks. Maybe they should check their neighborhood for annoying kids or something who like to pester folks like that. Or install security cameras to catch the actual culprits on tape before accusing the acts on an imaginary being. Just a tip.

(via The Agitator)